Decision-making, Cultural Transmission and Adaptation in Economic Anthropology

This paper argues that economic anthropologists need to reduce their reliance on cost-benefit decisionmaking, and incorporate a cognitively informed understanding of social learning, cultural transmission and information processing. Human behavioral patterns are unlikely to be primarily a product of cost-benefit decision-making because: 1) Laboratory data show that human information processing is so fraught with errors, biases and mis-calibrations that, if this is our primary mode of adaptation or of achieving individual goals, we should observe systematic patterns of maladaptation or of goal-averting behavior; and 2) Ethnographic data show that individuals often lack the kinds of information required by typical cost-benefit models. As a theoretical alternative, I argue that humans rely heavily on biased cultural transmission. By selectively copying certain individuals or ideas, biased cultural transmission can (over time) generate the well-integrated, adaptive, behavioral patterns that we observe ethnographically.